Mark L. Louden

Two years ago I was reading through a fascinating publication that appeared irregularly between 1943 and 1946. Der Pennsylvanisch Deitsch Eileschpiggel (The Pennsylvania Dutch Eulenspiegel [<Till Eulenspiegel, a prankster in German folklore]) was brought out by by J. William Frey (1916–1989), who was for many years a professor of German and Russian at Franklin and Marshall College. Frey was a native speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch who wrote his doctoral thesis on the language at the University of Illinois and became a pioneer in the field of Pennsylvania Dutch studies. The Eileschpiggel, which bore the subtitle En Zeiding, Schwetzbrief un Blauderschtick far die Deitsche (A newspaper, newsletter, and chat-sheet for the Pennsylvania Dutch), included Pennsylvania Dutch prose and poetry along with many other items of interest for both “scholars and laymen.”

In the first issue of the Eileschpiggel, Frey printed a short piece in Pennsylvania Dutch by a fellow native speaker and German professor at Lehigh University, Ralph Charles Wood, who expressed his support for Frey’s enterprise. Wood wrote:

This is not the first time that people have tried to publish a Pennsylvania Dutch newspaper to talk a little about the language in the language itself. Around 1860, Samuel Ernst of Millwood, Gap, [PA], published a newspaper in three languages – High German, Pennsylvania Dutch, and English . . .

My curiosity was piqued, since I had never heard of Samuel Ernst and his trilingual publication. After a little sleuthing, I learned that Ernst was an “old” Mennonite who was born in Lancaster County in 1825, moved to Olathe, Kansas, in 1884, and died there in 1909. The newspaper Wood was referring to actually began in 1870 and was titled The Acorn and Germ.

According to the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, The Acorn and Germ was published by Ernst and his son, Eleazar Israel (known as “E. Z. Ernst,” the “Z” referring to his mother’s maiden name, Zimmerman) from July until December 1870, at which time it was succeeded by Der Waffenlose Wächter (The weaponless watchman), which Samuel edited alone. The Wächter initially appeared monthly and eventually quarterly, continuing until 1888. Through the kind assistance of Iren L. Snavely, the Rare Books Librarian at the Pennsylvania State Library in Harrisburg,  I was able to obtain digital copies of several issues the The Acorn and Germ and Der Waffenlose Wächter from September 1870 through April 1871, some highlights of which I will share here.

Ernst’s newspapers were indeed trilingual, with material mainly in English and German, but also Pennsylvania Dutch. In my last post on this blog about Mennonites and Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch, I mentioned that Samuel Ernst is one of just two identified Anabaptists who published Pennsylvania Dutch material in the nineteenth century, the other being John H. Oberholtzer (1809–1895). Both Oberholtzer and Ernst expressed the concern in their respective publications that younger American Mennonites, especially schoolchildren, had insufficient knowledge of High German for the practice of their faith. This concern is shared by many Amish and Old Order Mennonites today, who continue to use the Luther Bible and German-language prayer and hymn books for devotions and worship.

A few words are in order about what kind of German was used by Anabaptists and other Pennsylvania Dutch speakers in Samuel Ernst’s day. Ralph Charles Wood, the German linguist and Pennsylvania Dutch scholar mentioned above, described it as “Pennsylvania High German” to distinguish it from the written German standard used in modern Europe. High German, so-called for the fact that it is based most closely on written dialects used in one part of the High (as opposed to Low) German dialect area (where “high” and “low” refer to the elevation of the Central European landscape), was not widely spoken in the 18^th century, when the ancestors of the Pennsylvania Dutch set out for America. At that time and continuing into the 20^th century, there was considerable variation in how German was written and even more variation in how it was pronounced when spoken.

Pennsylvania High German, which is still used by the Old Orders today, was strongly influenced by Pennsylvania Dutch, the vernacular language, as well as English. Its users, being cut off from German-speaking Europe since the 18^th century, were unaffected by the increasing standardization of German vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and eventually, pronunciation throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The maintenance of High German in devotion and worship was important for generations of Anabaptists, as well as other German-American Christians, especially Lutherans. For contemporary Old Orders, the continued use of their Mudderschprooch (mother tongue), which refers to both Deitsch (Pennsylvania Dutch) and Hochdeitsch (High German), is a salient marker of an identity that connects them to the spiritual heritage they brought with them from the Old World.

Samuel Ernst’s reverence for German was ardent. At the top of one page in every issue of The Acorn and Germ he printed the aphorism

Wir ströben nicht um zeitlich’s gut,

Obgleich wir lieben Deutsches blut

which may be translated as “We do not strive for temporal goods, but we love [our] German blood.” The spelling and word choice are classically Pennsylvania High German and differ from how the aphorism would be rendered in its normative European counterpart:

Wir streben nicht um zeitliches Gut,

Aber wir lieben deutsches Blut.

Contemporary Old Orders might feel uncomfortable with the second part of Ernst’s aphorism, however they would find the quote below it that he printed from the Luther German Bible (based on 1 John 4 and 12) more in line with their sensibilities: “They are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them . . . if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

In the October 12, 1870, issue of The Acorn and Germ, Ernst published an interesting poem in Pennsylvania High German that he composed himself. Giving it the English title “On the German Language,” Ernst noted that the poem could be sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” a fitting expression of the fundamentally American cultural milieu in which he and his fellow Mennonites lived.

The form of German that Ernst used was consistent with that of other Pennsylvania Dutch writers at that time; the poem’s content, however, would likely have struck his fellow Anabaptists as somewhat odd and perhaps a bit too worldly in its tone, bordering on the German-nationalistic.

There is much more fascinating material to be mined from the publications of Samuel Ernst, including on the topic of language, some of which I hope to share in future posts.